Virtual communities increasingly make use of standard Internet-enabled web services to support their collaborative activities. Such web services need to offer the right amount of functionality to meet community requirements. However, both requirements and enabling services are continuously in flux. A critical challenge therefore is that the community can efficiently ensure that web service changes are both technically feasible and socially acceptable.

In this paper, we outline a selection approach for virtual communities that takes into account both the feasibility and the acceptability of web services. To this purpose, we adopt a semiotic view on the selection process, showing that for the adequate selection of web services three subprocesses are required: (1) syntactic discovery, (2) semantic matching, and (3) pragmatic interpretation. We then present a meta-model of web service selection support that is grounded in this view. This model can be used to detect gaps in web service selection support. This knowledge is essential for the construction of better selection support methodologies. We apply the meta-model to analyze a case on a courseware development community.